It’s a wired, wired world
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
OFTEN in columns, I may refer to a wire story which has revealed
some stupefying, amazing incident, like, for instance, that Tunisian
scientists have discovered only intact biscuits contain actual calories, as
the broken biscuits’ calories leech away.
(It breaks my heart that this is not true, although it would explain
a lot about why my bathroom scales seem so prone to exaggeration.)
Every now and then, a cluey reader off their medication writes to me about such things, questioning the veracity of my information.
For instance, a letter might begin: ‘‘Dear Missy, your column is
ridiculous. Everyone knows Tunisia is spelt with two Ns and a silent P, and, besides, how can you possibly read a story about these scientists if the story is made entirely out of wire?’’
These are always penetrative questions. The answer is that we read
the wire stories more slowly and while wearing thick gloves. Obviously.
But still, I can understand the sceptism out there about the origins of these mysterious ‘‘wire stories’’. Yet, unlike those yarns of dubious birthright on the Internet - of which we know only that a computer programmer with lots of asterisks in his name invented them - wire stories, while weird, are, by and large, also true.
Here’s how it works: at any given time, there are probably about a
billion stupid things being done by a million stupid folk around the world,
which explains where karaoke, tractor catapulting and Jar Jar Binks come
from.
With all these stupid events taking place, most of them analysed in
science labs in Austria or carried out in remote farming regions of Third
World countries, it greatly increases the odds of a foreign journalist
somewhere witnessing at least one such incident involving a cow and a very large pair of floaties. They will then write this up for their home
newspaper.
As Australian papers also buy the rights to run these stories, they
lob into our computer system electronically down the ‘‘wire’’, via the
cryptically named ‘‘wire service’’. This is completely unrelated to, but
almost as good as, the wire rack you air your biscuits on. (A wire service
has fewer fringe benefits, however.)
Thus, in a few days, we might see a brief mention in our paper about
a flying cow in New Mexico saved because it was wearing floaties when it hit that lake.
Well, I’d love to dally, but there are a couple of hot wire stories
demanding my immediate and unequivocal chortling: a Canadian man, Rene Joly, is suing because his rights as a ‘‘genetically born Martian’’ are being impinged upon. (Hate it when that happens.)
And a pet pot-bellied pig in Birmingham, London, is so keen on
computer games which it plays it for hours, that its owner is giving it its
very own computer.
Worry if the pig beats its owner’s high score.
No wait, just worry about the owner anyway ...
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 11 APR 2000